Trouble installing, even more when trying to recover. Please help.

Hey there, this is my first post. So I'm not exactly the greatest when it comes to computers. A friend of mine had gotten me a copy of windows 7 (legally) through school. So the entire installation process goes well and then it starts to boot up for the first use and I get a white screen with a giant red "ERROR" on it saying it can't find c:\RECOVERY.DAT. there is my problem, my laptop is bricked and I haven't the foggiest what to do. I tried downloading a vista recovery disk and putting that in the drive but no luck. Please help, I'm pretty screwed without this laptop. I looked around and apparently it happens to a lot of ASUS users trying to upgrade. Thanks for any responses.

Well I've found my stock restore disks, but they're not booting when I put them in the drive. I need this laptop for school. Please, any help would be appreciated.

Hi DrummerDKS - Welcome to w7forums

I have seen that message before and was related to the recovery partition.

The way this was fixed in the past was to delete the recovery partition. You can download partitioning freeware and delete all the partitions on the drive, then try the install again.

Another thing is you must have your system's first boot option set to CD/DVD. This can be checked or set if need be in the System Bios.

One last option would be to use the partitioning freeware and simply mark the recovery partition as active. This would allow you to recover your system back to the way it was shipped.